Tag Archives: parenting

Since my latest posts have been a little heavy, I decided to post on a lighter subject and share one of my favorite parenting books–a book that’s helped me immensely to stay connected to my kiddo. I also share my PDF printable notes on the book below, so enjoy!

If you’re parent and you’ve done a little sleuthing, you’ve probably heard of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. It has, and deserves, a reputation as the modern parenting bible. If you haven’t checked it out—whether you find it difficult to manage your kid(s) or not—I highly recommend that you do.

This is the best parenting book I’ve ever read for a very simple reason; it clearly and effectively lays out an actionable parenting strategy. This strategy involves maintaining boundaries without being a tyrant, being authoritative without being authoritarian, and connecting to your kid on their level, in a way they can understand.

The Proverbial Parenting Manual

It literally helped me wrap my head around parenting for the first time. Before that, I was pretty much at a loss. Not to mention, it made it fun. It gave me the tools to turn daily struggles into games, and meltdowns into heart-to-hearts. Obviously, this isn’t the case every time, because that’s life, but it was after reading this book that my experience of parenting did a complete one-eighty.

After I read it, I was so eager for more that I went straight to the authors’ other work, Liberated Parents, Liberated Children, and then even further to that of their mentor, Dr. Haim Ganott’s Between Parent and Child. The first is something like a Q&A after the first book, with real life stories of parents putting the skills they learned into practice.

The latter of the two lays out more of the theory behind the practical strategies of the first book, along with child development concepts and the beautiful premise that when children are treated with humanity, they become authentic, compassionate humans.

I loved HTTSKWL (as I call it) so much that I made myself a detailed outline and posted it on my bulletin board so I can refer back to it frequently, which I do. I also implemented it in my classroom when I taught preschool, and had wonderful results (of course, the techniques work A LOT better when it’s not your own kid. That’s just the parenting curse).

Get Your Printable!

You can download your own copy of my notes in PDF format by entering your email below. No other emails will be sent, and I won't share your information with anyone else.

Since it's my first, I’d love to know what you think of the printable. If you do download, please share your thoughts in the comments below!

Whenever I notice things are starting to spin a little at home, I revisit these simple strategies and it nearly always gets things back on track.

My favorite thing about them is that they make my kiddo feel heard. They teach how to validate, how to just listen, how to not immediately jump into trying to solve every problem for your kid, but instead simply hearing them and what they are experiencing.

They also teach how to allow natural consequences to undesirable behaviors arise on their own, without blaming, shaming, or labeling. It’s the furthest thing from the ‘be seen and not heard’ philosophy you can get.

Find Community

The Faber Mazlish website offers lots of resources, including workshops all over the world where parents can gather, work on the techniques together, and build community.

If you live in the San Francisco bay area or France and are interested in attending a workshop, please be in touch!

I have a little mom rule I call the “oxygen mask method”. Very simply, it’s making sure my needs are met before I move on to meeting my son’s. This might sound a little selfish at first blush, but I’ve come to learn the hard way—over and over again—that it is indispensable, imperative, and utterly sacred in my parenting book.

Let me explain.

We’ve all seen the safety demonstration at the beginning of a flight; the attendants remind us to secure our own masks before we move on to our children. The logic is simple; if you pass out, you won’t do a whole lot of good for your kid.

Same principle applied to life. If you don’t feel safe, secure, loved, nourished, fulfilled, healthy, and content, your kid can’t either. They can’t because you are their example of how to be in the world, of how to behave, how to relate, how to love, and how to feel.

No pressure, right?

The good news is that this tosses old school guilt-driven parenting out the window.

Self-Care Isn’t Self-Indulgence

Parenting will always be self-sacrificing, because that’s the nature of parenting. You give up your own small desires, like going out for drinks or watching one more episode of Mad Men, but in so doing you experience the real freedom of acting for a cause that is greater than yourself.

The space created by giving up those fun but frivolous things opens you up to a larger purpose, one with much more meaning and value, one that is ultimately much more satisfying.

Don’t get me wrong, life needs a good dose of frivolity, too. That’s where the oxygen mask method comes in.

It’s easy to justify overworking, over-parenting, and over-adulting by the fact that you’re “doing it for you kid”. The problem is, you’re doing it for your future kid, not the one who’s there with you right now.

What that kid needs is for your to be, well, there with him or her right now.

Getting Back to Basics

The way to do that is to take care of #1. When my needs are more than taken care of, I feel that I have the space, the energy, and the patience to fully show up for my son. I’m not worrying about when I’m going to fit in a nap, or cook myself a nice meal, or when I’m going to get my next workout in.

And when I don’t have all those things worked out ahead of time, I notice that I get impatient, sometimes anxious, even resentful of my son’s demands on me. I’m less present, less playful, and frankly — less fun to be around.

That’s because my needs are actually coming into conflict with my child’s needs. Not a fun place to be, especially when you’re the primary caregiver.

It’s kind of like being hangry, except what you’re hungry for is a little TLC from you to yourself. I like to remember AA’s tip: if you’re feeling off, H.A.L.T. — and check in. Are you Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired? If so, you know what to do (we are pretty much like grown up toddlers, in the end).

Self-sacrifice is a beautiful thing. Self-negation is not. Your’re not going to put up with it in the long run, so the imbalance will seep out in ways that aren’t going to be fun for you or your kid. Plus, your kid needs to see a whole person, proud of and aware of who they are, so they can be that, too.

Being A Mom Who Is Her Own Person

This is especially important for women, who have been so conditioned to give their creativity and energy away for the benefit of others; their parents, their children, their husbands, their friends.

Being a mother and taking care of your own needs–and not just the basics but the deeper, human needs of creative expression, community, and contribution (whether that’s coding or accounting or cooking or being on the PTA)—is a revolutionary act. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, it matters what it feels like.

The number one quality that comes from taking care of myself first and Noah second is playfulness. When I’m rested, nourished, and content, that means I’m ready to play, both in my own life and with my kid. And that makes me an awesome mom.

Stress puts us in survival mode. It kills creativity. It makes us lament the past and worry about the future. It is not conducive to playfulness, or joy, or presence.

It All Comes Down to This

When I have rest, exercise, healthy eating, and a fair dose of adult social time (even if it is the PTA meeting) auto-built into my routine, I can be at 100%. That means Noah gets the best of me when I’m with him. I can sit down on the mat and play cars for an hour, or climb up a hillside on an expedition for dandelions.

And those things don’t feel like impositions. They feel like the reason for everything else that I do. The job, the chores, the errands, are all for those little moments.

And the job, the chores, and the errands become little moments in themselves.

This way, life itself becomes a game, a playful and childlike journey, and an act of love. Easier said than done, for sure, especially in this extremely fast-paced, high-stress world that we’ve created for ourselves.

It’s more important and more difficult than ever to carve out time to just be, to go slow, to let go of everything else so we can show up in our own lives and be there with our kids.

In its best moments, parenting is a little taste of the most salient aspect of being human; moving beyond yourself and being of service to another.

Let me qualify this by saying I don’t feel that way 100% of the time. Or even 75% of the time. Being human is tough. Being a parent on top of that? The pressure is multiplied a thousand fold.

But in the end, we need to express in order to stay balanced and happy. If we don’t, we get stuck inside ourselves and have that vague sense of something missing. The really difficult part for parents is finding the energy.

I’ve struggled a lot with feeling strong enough to pick myself up and see friends, work out, or do something nourishing simply for the hell of it. Not only is it easy to come up with hundreds of little reasons not to, but sometimes it just doesn’t feel possible.

But living life in this way is the best kind of gift we can give to our kids. If they have a vibrant, fulfilled, and self-possessed parent as an example, they are a lot more likely to end up that way themselves.

Finding a balance in parenting is hard. Knowing just the right amount of effort vs the right amount of letting go is almost impossible. It’s a constant back of forth between the rational and the emotional, but I find that the true sweet spot–as in all things–happens just beyond the two, when intuition kicks in.

There are plenty of days, today being one of them, that I find myself kind of overdoing it. Okay, not kind of. Like completely, utterly, neurotically overdoing it. You see your kid do one thing wrong, and it’s like an entire lifetime of maladaptive behavior and social ostracism flashes before your eyes.

These are the moments when I–or more often, someone in the vicinity who happens to be a little more connected to reality at that moment–remind myself to take a step back and let go of control.

When Your Mind Becomes Your Enemy

If you have these kind of thought-streams, as a parent or in general, you get what I mean. You can go from a perfect, tranquil day at the park to juvenile hall (in your head) when the latter has absolutely no bearing on the situation at all. Obviously, it’s not fun to experience this as a parent, but when it happens often enough, it’s extremely unfair to your kid.

I’ve unfortunately learned this the hard way as a person who has experienced anxiety on and off throughout her life. One negative thought can lead to another, and quickly a chain of these kinds of thoughts can become a full blown panic attack. This is why it’s so essential, especially when you have a quick, mercurial mind, to guard the gates and feed yourself positive mental food. Practices like meditation, yoga nidra, affirmations, and self-care, self-care, self-care are ESSENTIAL. In my life and on my journey to freedom from the tyranny of my own mind, they are NON-OPTIONAL.

When it comes to my kid, I’ve learned that he sees himself how I see him. And I mean this completely literally. If I’m jumping from watching him shove another rowdy boy at the park to visions of him being the school bully, he internalizes that perception, too. It’s not as if he’s reading my mind–yet in a sense, he is.

The Science Behind The Scenes

The reason for this lies in the science of mirror neurons, which are essentially the neurological key to social behavior. Mirror neurons fire when we observe another human being performing an action, and they fire the exact same way when we perform that action ourselves.

They are the literal version of monkey see, monkey do, and they are also the explanation for the phenomenon of “catching” a yawn. Watch one person yawn, and your mirror neurons will almost invariably cause you to yawn as well. Interestingly, defects in mirror neurons are found in those who have autism, which accounts for what is sometimes seen as atypical social behavior in those on the spectrum.

As a parent, mirror neurons provide evidence to support the idea that my perception becomes my kid’s reality. The thoughts and feelings that I have about him translate, both through his emotional receptivity as an extremely sensitive kid and via the mirror neuron connection.

When I step in and give him that look that says, “You’re being bad,” no matter how sensitive my words are, he internalizes that awful thought. For a kid, there is no difference between the “You’re being bad” look and one that says “You are a bad person”.

Taking Responsibility, Disowning Anxiety

When I realized how much the anxiety I was experiencing was affecting my son, I went on a long, arduous, and bumpy journey to figure out how to stop being such a nervous wreck all the time.

With the love, support, and no-bullshit approach of a few amazing teachers, I can say with confidence that I have all the tools I need to change my way of being from anxiety to positivity, and more than that, to presence.

Now, do I succeed at doing that all the time? Heeeeell no.

But I’m working on it. Every. Single. Day.

Changing your DNA is serious business. But it is possible. I have seen firsthand that when I am in a balanced, non-anxious state, my son feels secure, stable, loved, and heard. What this means for me is that anxiety is no longer an option. My son’s well-being is way too important to spend another day in fear.